Da un'intervista a Thomas Dolby (del 2016, quindi poco attendibile per i dettagli):
“The naughty kids at my school used to go and smoke in the afternoons in a little cafe, and we would sit around poring over one cup of tea for three hours talking about music, and in 1975/6 it was Yes and Genesis and Steely Dan and stuff like that. But the most knowledgeable of my group was a guy called Shane McGowan, and he had an encyclopedic brain when it came to music. He knew everything. He could tell you who played sax on the 1962 version of X Y and Z. He was a pretty scary specimen even aged 15, but he had this incredible brain for music.
“And I remember clearly one day we were all sitting there talking about the latest Yes triple anthology or whatever and Shane walks in and he goes ‘It’s all crap!’ We said ‘whaaat?’ ‘All that progressive music is crap. And the Beatles and the Stones, it’s all rubbish.’
“And we were like ‘whaaaat! how dare you?’ How could he possibly disrespect our idols? ‘What should we be listening to Shane?’ He told us to listen to Johnny Thunder, the New York Dolls, MC5, Iggy Pop, the Ramones.
“We’d never heard of any of these people but they were evidently American and we were deeply deeply shocked that he should be so irreverent, but there was something very tantalising about the idea that there was a whole other wave of music that would be more exciting.